Brit-Am Research Sources (April 28, 2013, Iyar 18, 5773)
Contents:
All three entries below were Forwarded by Craig White
1. Was the Empire really so bad? by David Blair
2. A Moral Audit of the British Empire by Piers Brendon
3. Britain may have invaded 90 per cent of the world, but we're not hated everywhere by Colin Freeman
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1. Was the Empire really so bad? by David Blair
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidblair/100188640/was-the-empire-really-so-bad/
Extracts:
It turned out that Captain C.W. Cook was the senior British official in Juba before independence in 1956. According to my Sudanese friend, he was responsible for turning Juba from a remote outpost on the banks of the White Nile into a small town and administrative centre. Captain Cook designed a neat grid of tree-lined streets, brought in electricity for the first time and set up the first schools in the area. I remember my Sudanese friend saying how he 'did all he could to help the people here'.
The really astonishing fact is that only a tiny handful of people like Captain Cook were responsible for governing Sudan during that era. Because of its strange status as an 'Anglo-Egyptian Condominium,' Sudan was not run by officials from the normal Colonial Service. Instead the country had its own elite corps of administrators called the Sudan Political Service. And there were never more than 130 of them. The biggest country in Africa, covering more than a million square miles, was governed by people who you could have fitted inside two London buses with space left over. Under their aegis, Sudan enjoyed the only prolonged period of peace in its modern history. Their achievement seems undeniable.
I don't want to go back to those days. But they were not all bad.
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2. A Moral Audit of the British Empire by Piers Brendon
http://www.historytoday.com/piers-brendon/moral-audit-british-empire
Extracts:
The moral balance sheet of the British Empire is a chaotic mixture of black and red. ... a moral audit cannot calculate what benefits might have accrued to India, say, if no colonial occupation had taken place. ...
On the credit side, first of all, the British Empire was a liberal empire. It was founded on principles classically enunciated by Edmund Burke, who maintained that colonial government was a trust. It should to be exercised for the benefit of subject peoples, who would eventually attain their natural right to self-rule. As Burke famously declared, 'The British Empire must be governed on a plan of freedom, for it will be governed by no other.' More or less sincerely, Britons reiterated this claim over the next two centuries. The Tory Primrose League took as its motto, Imperium et Libertas. In 1921 Lloyd George told the Imperial Conference that the British Empire was unique because 'Liberty is its binding principle.' Whitehall mandarins said that the evolution of Empire into Commonwealth after the Second World War completed the process whereby colonial territories came to stand on their own feet.
... in India they did their best to eradicate thuggee and suttee, General Sir Charles Napier rejecting cultural relativism and promising to act according to the custom of his own country: 'when men burn women alive we hang them.' In Africa they endeavoured to put down slavery, Christian missionaries following the example of David Livingstone, who was said to have sacrificed his life 'to heal this open sore of the world'. In New Zealand they suppressed cannibalism and the traffic in tattooed Maori heads - traders had taken to bidding for them when they were still attached to shoulders. In Hong Kong they tried to stop foot-binding and infanticide.
Bearers of the White Man's Burden also laboured to promote the positive welfare of their charges. At the top, for example, Lord Curzon worked indefatigably as Viceroy to give India measures of justice, reform and social improvement. Taking to government (to paraphrase The Times) as other men take to drink, he aspired to give India the best administration it had ever had. He fostered commerce, expanded communications, developed irrigation, relieved famine, encouraged education, restored monuments, strengthened defence and promoted efficiency. He even ordered the removal of pigeon droppings from Calcutta's Public Library. ..
Similarly, at the bottom of the Empire's administrative ladder, many British officials evinced a remarkable propensity to favour their black or brown charges at the expense of their white overlords. The unpublished memoir of an Irish lawyer, Manus Nunan, who was usually scathing about the English, contains nothing but praise for the District Officers he met in ;Nigeria during the 1950s: 'Their concern for the native people they governed was wonderful.' ; E.D. Morel (1873-1924), that scourge of imperial wrong-doing, made the same point: such civil servants were 'strong in their sense of justice, keen in their sense of right, firm in their sense of duty'. They were honest, brave, responsible and, above all, industrious.
Even George Orwell, who had seen colonial dirty work at close quarters in Burma in the 1920s, acknowledged that the British Empire was much better than any other. It was vastly superior, in moral terms, to the French, German, Portuguese and Dutch empires. And it bore no resemblance to the 'vampire empire' created by King Leopold of the Belgians in the Congo, which was responsible for perhaps 10 million deaths, let alone to the genocidal Nazi empire or to Japan's vicious and corrupt Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
What of the debit side? ... In the British mouth 'liberty' was part of the insufferable cant used to conceal the brutal realities of imperialism. The Empire was 'a despotism with theft as its final object', as George Orwell said, and the pukka sahib's code was slimy humbug. ...Lord Salisbury himself exposed the truth. 'If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people,' he observed, 'the British Empire would not have been made.' Its purpose was not to spread sweetness and light but to increase Britain's wealth and power. Naturally its coercive and exploitative nature must be disguised. Bamboozle was better than bamboo, he considered, and 'as India must be bled, the bleeding should be done judiciously.'
Actually, from the time that Britain had begun to transform its commercial dominance into political ascendancy, India was bled white. During the 1760s Bengal was so squeezed that the province, which the Mughals had called 'the paradise of earth', became an abyss of torment. It was ravaged by war, pestilence and famine. A third of the population died of hunger, some driven to cannibalism. Although relief efforts were made, British 'bullies, cheats and swindlers' continued to prey on the carcass of Bengal and some profiteered in hoarded grain. Meanwhile Indian revenues (which amounted to perhaps a billion pounds sterling between Plassey in 1757 and Waterloo in 1815) spelled the redemption of Britain, according to the Earl of Chatham. They were 'a kind of gift from heaven'.
The history of the Raj was punctuated by further famines, which caused tens of millions of deaths. ...
...There could be no justification for the Tasmanian genocide or the slaughter of Australian aborigines. Yet as late as 1883 a colonial governor reported to Gladstone that refined Queenslanders talked approvingly 'not only of the wholesale butchery (for the iniquity of that may sometimes be disguised from themselves) but of the individual murder of natives'. Similarly twentieth-century British officials approved punitive operations in the southern Sudan even though they produced a crop of 'regular Congo atrocities' amounting almost to genocide.
...During the South African War the British allowed a sixth of the Boer population, mostly children, to die in concentration camps.
The catalogue of gross imperial wrongdoing is not hard to extend. It includes instances of exploitation such as the slave trade and the indentured labour traffic; cases of acquisitive aggression such the opium wars and the rape of Matabeleland;...
Needless to say, much of the imperial legacy was failed states and internecine strife.
All balance sheets require interpretation; but it seems clear that, even according to its own lights, the British Empire was in grave moral deficit.
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3. Britain may have invaded 90 per cent of the world, but we're not hated everywhere by Colin Freeman
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/colinfreeman/100188474/britain-may-have-invaded-90-per-cent-of-the-world-but-were-not-hated-everywhere/
Extracts:
.. the new study by historian Stuart Laycock, who decided to count just how many countries Britain had invaded after being asked that very question by his 11-year-old son. The result apparently surprised even Mr Laycock. Of nearly 200 countries worldwide, Britain had invaded 90 per cent of them, either by colonisation, war or an armed presence of some sort. Indeed, it was easier to sum up by listing the few nations we hadn't touched - mainly the likes of Chad, Tajikistan and other places that colonial powers either weren't bothered about having, or perhaps simply never realised were there. ...
Then there are the war memorials and cemeteries for British and Commonwealth soldiers, which can be found in some 153 countries worldwide, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Once in the desert outside Basra in southern Iraq, I came across such a memorial dedicated to those who died in Britain's Mesopotamian campaign in the First World War. Many people, I suspect, would not even be aware that Britain fought a campaign there at that time. Yet the memorial commemorates some 40,500 names, which puts the 179 fatalities of the modern Basra campaign into perspective somewhat.
Indeed, the question of Britain's colonial past is often a touchier subject with the Brits than it is with those they have conquered. On another occasion in Basra, I watched a British Army squirming with embarrassment when an Iraqi community leader informed him that "you British are so much better at running things than we are, just like you did a hundred years ago".